This invention relates to a luggage management system used in the field of luggage transportation and distribution, such as, quick home delivery or transportation of luggage to its destination, and more particularly to a system of the kind described above in which a portable convenient terminal having functions of issuing, displaying, registering, examining and recording information including the serial slip number and destination of luggage, such as, a parcel is used together with an electronic tab so as to manage transportation of such luggage.
In a prior art luggage management system in which parcels collected by a parcel collector are transported so as to be quickly delivered to their destination, a portable convenient terminal of the above-described kind was carried by the hand of the parcel collector to the consignor's home to receive the parcel from the consignor, and various data regarding the received parcel to be transported were inputted into and processed by the portable convenient terminal. Such a portable convenient terminal was constructed by combining various parts including a keyboard part, a data display part, a control part, a memory part, a power supply part and a printer part. Information including the sizes, weights and number of luggage and also their serial slip numbers and destination was inputted to the portable convenient terminal by the hand of the parcel collector, and bar codes printed on slips were read by a bar code reader so as to store data of the received parcels in the memory part of the terminal. When so required, the information regarding each parcel was printed out on a label, and the label having the destination code and other information printed thereon was attached to the received parcel.
In the prior art portable convenient terminal of this kind, it was a common practice that the operator sorted the received parcels by reading the information including the destination codes printed on the label attached to the received parcels. Such a manner of sorting was a great factor resulting in lowered efficiency and accuracy of the parcel sorting operation, parcel management and parcel tracing operation.
Recently, the bar code of the parcel label printed on the slip was read by a bar code reader manipulated by the operator so as to mechanize some of the above operations.
However, because of the fact that parcels have different sizes and shapes, the prior art portable convenient terminal of this kind designed to sort the parcels by reading the bar code of the parcel label by manipulation of the bar code reader could not improve the efficiency and accuracy of the parcel sorting operation.
Also, the parcel information printed on the slips attached to the parcels to indicate the sizes, weights, number of parcels, serial slip numbers, consignees' addresses, consignors' addresses, parcel contents, etc., that is, the information registered on the bar code label only is not enough to grasp the particulars of the parcels. Therefore, the step for collating the parcel information with the bar code number is troublesome and depends greatly on visual inspection by the operator, and the necessity for the visual inspection by the operator was a great factor resulting in the lowered efficiency and accuracy of the sorting operation, parcel management and parcel tracing operation. Further, there was no consideration for strictly ensuring the security guaranteeing the safeguard, safety and reliability of quick home delivery of a customer's important parcel. Thus, loss of parcels due to an error during the sorting step and parcel management step was inevitable.